At next week’s Museums and the Web Conference the theme is the Web 2.0. From the opening plenary to the closing, everyone is talking about it. The closing plenary is even called Museum 2.0 (which is the second time I’ve seen this term, :-)). I thought it might be interesting to chart the term “Web 2.0” in Technorati. Since February 1st, there have been roughly average of 1,000 posts with the term Web 2.0 compared to about 100 in March of last…
A friend pointed out an article in the Washington Post about The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum entitled, A Curate-Your-Own Museum Web Site. The so-called “online national design museum” promises to open the museum and its vast collection to visitors anywhere in the world. What’s more, if development can keep up with vision, the site will turn museumgoers into participants in a bold cultural experiment. Interactivity is the key. Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Thompson describes “an open theater for ideas.” And John Maeda, a digital…
Last week, I attended a roundtable discussion called “E-Learning in Museums” held by the Canadian Heritage Information Network in Ottawa. One of the other speakers, George Siemens gave an interesting presentation entitled, Connectivism: Museums as Learning Ecologies. For those of you in the museum field and in education, George’s blog elearnspace is a great resource, dating back to June 2002, practically ancient history as far as blogs are concerned. He also maintains a site on Connectivism, so if you’re interested in…
We got quite a response from our “Museum Blogs and Community Sites Survey” last week. We received a number of pointers to additional blogs as well as rapid links from Hanging Together, Mario Bucolo Museums Blog, the Walker Art Center Blogs, NetSquared, Loreto Martin, and others. In addition, for the first time our blog received more visits that our portfolio site here at Ideum, in fact visitation was higher by a 2-to-1 margin. Our modest survey seems to…
Last year, we designed a site for the Nevada Clean Energy Coalition to assist their efforts to stop the construction of a coal burning power plant. Late last week, we learned in the Reno Gazette Journal that Sempra Energy has halted work on its federally required environmental study. Sempra spokesman Doug Kline in San Diego said the company is holding back on all of the permits while “reconfiguring the project design, based on talks with potential partners and potential customers.” Apparently, the potential…
We’ve just finished our first survey of museum blogs and community sites. The complete report is available as a PDF at the bottom of this post. We found 26 sites and collected basic information about each. The sites range from Art Museum blogs to Science Museums community-sites to personal blogs about museums. Here’s a portion of the Summary and Methodology from the Survey… The purpose of this survey was to get a sense of the level of activity within the museum field when…
Next week I will be speaking at a roundtable discussion called “E-Learning in Museums” for the Canadian Heritage Information Network in Ottawa. My presentation is simply entitled “Museums and Web 2.0.” For those attending, I wanted to make the presentation along with sources and links available. Also, I thought others might have some interest, as there is not much out on the Web about how museums are using 2.0 technologies. The presentation provides an overview of Web 2.0 and looks at the current…
A new paper Community Sites & Emerging Sociable Technologies has just been posted on the Museums and the Web 2006 conference website. I had the pleasure of co-writing this paper with Kevin von Appen from Ontario Science Centre and Bryan Kennedy from Science Museum of Minnesota. Here's the abstract… A generation of new, easy-to-use "sociable technologies" is creating opportunities for museums to pioneer the creation of on-line communities. These communities can deepen and extend relationships with and among visitors, while moving museums beyond…
Our latest widget is now available in Yahoo! Widget Gallery. This one displays images from the National Science Foundation’s Multimedia Gallery. The gallery is updated fairly often and the images are a compelling mix of science-related photographs and visualizations. We’re still working on Mac OS X Desktop versions of some of our widgets, the construction is bit more complex than those of the Yahoo!/Konfabulator variety. If you’re interested learning more about Widgets, Kevin Silver here at Ideum wrote an excellent piece entitled,…
